Samantha Crain & the Midnight Shivers

About the Artist

With a blow-your-hair-back vocal presence that occasionally yields to whisper-soft vulnerability, 22-year-old Samantha Crain unites the sounds of confidence and desperation.  Lyrics about disaster and despair peacefully coexist with anthems of community and reconciliation. Here are darkness and light; here are life and death.

These colliding realities stem most notably from Crain's unlikely artistic heritage, which she wears on her sleeve but just as readily transcends. Hailing from Shawnee, OK, the state that birthed The Flaming Lips and Woody Guthrie, Samantha Crain writes with both the brazen conviction of the latter and the unflinching creative ambition of the former. Hers is a folk tradition indebted to Radiohead as much as Bob Dylan. Her shadowy arrangements and razor-sharp lyrics blur whatever superficial lines of genre or aesthetic may seem to separate these influences. It seems whatever the ingredients; she has a place for them in her inexplicable artistic recipe. Her sound is deeply rural and southern, but it is also itinerant and urban. Like Jack Kerouac before her, Crain is lost on the subway, sleeping in boxcars, leaving lovers behind, and dining in small town obscurity all within a few short days.
 
Nearly more remarkable than her creative vision is her practical ambition. At the young age of twenty-two, Samantha Crain already has a booking agency, several national tours, and dozens of self-produced recordings to her credit. Her critically acclaimed 2008 debut release The Confiscation EP, on North Carolina independent label Ramseur Records (Avett Brothers, everybodyfields, Paleface) brought her music to a national audience and found her added to the Hotel Café tour and featured as one of Paste Magazine’s 22 up-and-coming artists.  With Songs InThe Night, we find the young artist once again confronting the dark sides of the human condition but finding inspiration in the process.